DePaul University student Ashlynn Reyes, 21, shares her GPS location with loved ones at all times. She carries pepper spray and tries to sit near other women. She stays off her phone so she can be alert.
That’s all for her daily commute, which includes a Chicago Transit Authority train ride.
“As a woman taking CTA during my entire high school experience and college, you never feel safe,” Reyes said. “You always have to be on the lookout.”
Since the pandemic, Reyes said she feels as though the CTA has become even more hazardous. Monday’s quadruple homicide on a Blue Line train has heightened her fears and those of thousands of other regular riders.
Those fears are not divorced from reality, a WBEZ analysis of police and CTA data has found.
The number of violent crime victimizations per CTA passenger trip nearly quadrupled between 2015 and 2021 and remains elevated today, according to the analysis. Violent crimes on buses, trains and other CTA properties during this year’s first eight months totaled 656.
All but 19 of those crimes were robberies, aggravated batteries and aggravated assaults that didn’t get much public attention. But homicides have also increased since the start of the pandemic, despite steps by CTA and the Chicago Police Department to boost security.
“I think Chicago as a whole has to respond better,” Reyes said. “I just came back from North Carolina and the trains there are incredibly clean. The security is much tighter.”
The CTA’s violent crime rate was just 1.1 per million CTA passenger trips as recently as 2015, according to the WBEZ analysis. The rate began creeping up in 2016 as violent crime increased in many city neighborhoods, then soared in 2020 after ridership plummeted upon the pandemic’s arrival. The rate peaked at 4.2 as transit use dropped to a low point in 2021.
After three years of partial ridership recovery, the CTA’s violent crime rate for the first half of this year was 3.4.
The increased rates of recent years owe more to the pandemic-related ridership nosedive than to violent crime increases in the transit system since 2015, the analysis found. In other words, the number of violent crimes has remained stable but the number of people riding the CTA has dropped, increasing the odds of a rider becoming a victim.
This highlights an inextricable link between safety and ridership. The more people who ride public transit, the safer it tends to be. But if riders don’t feel safe, they won’t return. That is one of CTA’s core conundrums.
“More folks riding transit helps enhance this collective sense of safety,” said University of Illinois Chicago urban planning professor Kate Lowe.
The most jarring crimes are homicides. A WBEZ map of homicides on CTA properties since 2001 shows they have taken place mainly in South and West side areas racked by community violence.
“The CTA is a microcosm of issues in the city [but] in more enclosed spaces on our trains and buses,” Active Transportation Alliance Executive Director Amy Rynell said. “So the impact of the crimes is felt differently in a more intimate way than sometimes it is on the street.”
But Lowe added that the passengers who feel most insecure may not face the greatest hazards: “We have to be clear about [who is having] an uncomfortable confrontation with structural poverty versus who is actually at risk of experiencing violence.”
Still, Monday’s predawn attack on four people presumed to be homeless has rattled many CTA riders.
Columbia College student Alex Rodriguez, 18, uses the same Forest Park station the train was approaching during the shootings.
Hearing about the incident “made me a bit anxious to get on the train,” said Rodriguez, who rides it downtown for his classes.
He said his parents asked him to stop taking the train and drive instead, even though that would lengthen his commute. He agreed.
Lowe, who studies transit accessibility for low-income populations, said such safety fears may be misplaced: “Sometimes these really tragic events make us ignore that many of us ride transit every day safely without incident. And sometimes we forget the risks of being in cars. … Crashes are a really serious risk.”
Police and CTA safety efforts
As CTA passengers have faced greater safety risks, CPD deployment hasn’t kept up.
In February 2020, just before the pandemic hit, the department’s two units that focus on the transit system totaled 187 sworn officers, according to the city Inspector General’s Office. For most of 2022, as pandemic-era ridership remained low and CTA violent crime reached its highest levels of the past decade, CPD’s transit units hovered between 138 and 148 cops. This past July, they totaled 171.
Those numbers don’t include a few dozen other CPD officers who, for several years, have been paid overtime by the CTA to patrol the transit system on their days off.
CPD declined to make any officers available to be interviewed about transit safety measures.
CTA has taken other security steps, President Dorval Carter Jr. said at a press conference following Monday’s homicides.
He said CTA over the last decade has expanded and upgraded “our network of nearly 30,000 security cameras, added security guards and [expanded] our volunteer policing program,” as the overtime for CPD officers is known.
CTA has also announced a year-long pilot effort to use artificial intelligence to identify guns in surveillance video on train platforms and alert police.
Carter touted CTA partnerships with social service agencies that help the unhoused at transit hubs including the Forest Park Blue Line stop, near the shooting scene.
He characterized that violence as an “isolated incident.”
But buses, trains and other CTA properties have been the scenes of 22 other homicides since 2020, the WBEZ analysis found. Those include three earlier this year.
Chicago’s homelessness crisis
Carter said more resources are needed to address the homelessness crisis that pushes people to sleep on trains: “You’re not going to solve homelessness, drug addiction or mental health on the CTA. You need to solve it in the communities where it exists. That requires resources to go way beyond anything that the village [of Forest Park] can provide by itself or the CTA.”
Some state lawmakers and urban planners say security threats in Chicago transit could be addressed by hiring non-police “transit ambassadors,” who would travel between stations, buses and train cars on coordinated patrols. Those staffers would greet riders, answer wayfaring questions, remind passengers of the rules, help connect them to mental health or social services if needed, de-escalate conflicts, apply first aid after an injury and so on.
Rynell, the transit advocate, said such a program could also reduce a perceived need for more cops on buses and trains: “A lot of people don’t want police because they feel like they’re already overpoliced.”
Another important way to improve transit security, experts say, is to improve service, especially the frequency of buses and trains to entice more passengers.
“More frequency also means you’re not waiting as long, and waiting can be really stressful, especially in neighborhoods experiencing high risk of interpersonal violence,” said Lowe, the urban planning professor.
“We’ve seen a resurgence of riders … but we haven’t returned to pre-COVID levels,” Rynell added. “Some of that is because we have less service operating out there. Some of it is because the service we have isn’t reliable and good, and some of it is because of the [poor] conditions on the trains and buses.”
“We need transit to be singing at its best for people to choose it as their first choice to get around,” Rynell said.
Chip Mitchell reports for WBEZ on policing, public safety and public health. Alden Loury is WBEZ’s data projects editor. Anna Savchenko is a WBEZ general assignment reporter. Amy Qin is a WBEZ data reporter. Follow them at @ChipMitchell1, @AldenLoury and @amyqin12.